


if you don't stop caring and fearing and noticing things

by goodbyechunkylemonmilk



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: F/F, Family Issues, Homophobia, Homophobic Language, Internalized Homophobia, Pre-Canon, Pre-Slash, Religious Content, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-10
Updated: 2017-04-10
Packaged: 2018-10-17 10:43:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10592361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodbyechunkylemonmilk/pseuds/goodbyechunkylemonmilk
Summary: Ronan has never been a big crier. And why should she be? Her life is as close to perfect as anyone’s has ever been. She has a father who loves her best, and a sister who does too, and a mother like light personified, bright and cheery and soft no matter what. When she remembers her childhood, it’s always with a backlit glow, like the very end of a movie when everything’s sorted out and it’s time to walk off into the sunset. She has acres and acres of land practically all to herself, and after church on Sundays, the whole family goes out for ice cream, even in the winter. It would be nice if her father were around more, but when he does come home, he greets her first, picks her up and twirls her around even though at fourteen she ought to be too old for it, and is certainly too big.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Basically I feel like Aurora was probably a great mother to them when they were small and only had problems little kids from reasonably functional families had, but that once they were full-fledged non-dream people with complex issues (like struggling to come out to their heavily-Catholic family), she would be totally unable to keep up.

Ronan has never been a big crier. And why should she be? Her life is as close to perfect as anyone’s has ever been. She has a father who loves her best, and a sister who does too, and a mother like light personified, bright and cheery and soft no matter what. When she remembers her childhood, it’s always with a backlit glow, like the very end of a movie when everything’s sorted out and it’s time to walk off into the sunset. She has acres and acres of land practically all to herself, and after church on Sundays, the whole family goes out for ice cream, even in the winter. It would be nice if her father were around more, but when he does come home, he greets her first, picks her up and twirls her around even though at fourteen she ought to be too old for it, and is certainly too big.

Her life is as close to perfect as anyone’s has ever been, so it has never occurred to her that anything about her could be wrong. She has a father who loves her best, and a sister who does too, and a mother like light personified, and not a one of them flinches when the priest starts talking about men lying with men, about sins against nature, about abominations. Her life is as close to perfect as anyone’s has ever been, until very suddenly it isn’t. She sits through Mass quietly, when she ought to be jabbing her elbow into Devin's side and drawing crude pictures on Martha’s bulletin, and she takes the middle seat in the car without complaint, and then she vomits up her pistachio sundae—her favorite, her father’s favorite—in the parking lot of the ice cream shop.

Devin gets a hand under her elbow once she’s finished and helps her up, a little brusque but the closest to sisterly she’s ever been, and doesn’t even complain about the flecks that landed on her shoes. Feeling affectionate, or maybe just faint, Ronan allows herself to be escorted back inside and crammed into the single-occupant restroom. She watches as Devin waves her hand under the automatic dispenser until she has a laboriously collected sheaf of paper towels clenched in her fist. Ronan reaches out, but Devin holds them out of reach, using her infuriating two extra inches of height to full advantage. “So,” she says, and Ronan realizes much too late that she’s walked into a trap. “That sermon really got to you, didn’t it?”

Ronan backs up until she hits the rim of the toilet bowl, looking around nonsensically for something to use to defend herself. She’s never had much of a need to lie, so she can feel how insincere, how flatly unconvincing, her excuse sounds even before she says it. “It’s just the flu, I think.” And then, a stroke of brilliance dampened by wooden delivery, “It’s going around at school. Practically half the girls in my class were out last week.”

“Funny, I’ve never heard of a flu that makes people look like they’re going to pass out right when someone starts reading from Leviticus 20:13. Is it new?”

“You’re imagining things.” Ronan takes a breath, grounding herself in the acrid scent of pine cleaner not-quite-covering urine. “Now can we _go_ , or do you actually want to have a theological discussion standing in a puddle of a stranger’s piss?”

Devin rolls her eyes and hands over the towels, which Ronan presses to her lips in one wrinkled clump. She spits out as much of the phlegm coating her mouth as she can, and then lets the whole mess fall to the floor. Devin wrinkles her nose. “I’m not going to tell anyone. Just so you know.”

“There’s nothing to tell. It’s the flu, like I said, or maybe food poisoning. It’s not a _secret_.”

Devin smirks, an expression Ronan recognizes from their boxing matches; she’s spotted an opening and is ready to land the knockout blow. “And is food poisoning the reason that whenever I see you in the halls at Aglionby, you’re on that Gansey girl like a second skin?” Ronan has never considered Gansey that way until this moment, but the truth of it leaves her unsteady on her feet. She shoves her way out the door, and in an uncharacteristic display of generosity, Devin stays behind long enough for her to pull herself together, slumped and breathing hard as one of the shop's employees watches her with a mop at the ready.

Once they’re back in the car, Ronan in the front so that no one has to share space with her, Devin says, “She has kind of a fever, I think,” as if she would ever do something as affectionate as place the back of her hand against Ronan’s forehead, and as if Ronan would let her. “She’ll be fine.”

Their father laughs, big and hearty, and says it’s a shame about the ice cream, but there’s always next week, and Ronan nods, and sticks her head as far out the window as she can without getting a lecture about automobile safety, and tries not to feel her life slipping through her fingers.

Nothing changes, except that Devin keeps trying to make significant eye contact with her, and she’s maybe a little less nice to Gansey than she should be, because every time they touch, she is suddenly, unavoidably aware of the way her heartbeat ratchets up, the effect worsened by her own inability to stop thinking about it. She goes to church to prove a point, and because she likes the parts of it that don’t make her feel like she’s in the middle of a growth spurt her skin hasn’t kept up with: the genuine calm that settles over her as she bows her head, the pure, emptied out feeling of leaving Confession, even if technically every one since her realization has been a lie. She only feels like an intruder at the very beginning, and at the end, before the rhythm of it all settles around her, and after it lifts.

She retreats to the stables every day she can get away with it. The animals, horses and cows and the half-feral cats she’s been trying for years to tame, don’t care about this part of her she doesn’t quite understand. Devin hates the cozy disorder of their sprawling property, so every second Ronan spends out of the house is one she doesn’t have to spend worrying about the constant implicit questioning of her sister’s gaze.

Aurora finds her curled, long limbs tight, in the back corner of the stable at the end of a marathon crying jag. She’d thought she was going to tell Gansey, who is not religious and nominally liberal besides, but instead she picked a fight, prodding at every well-hidden insecurity she could think of. Gansey didn’t respond, let Ronan tire herself out, and finally said, “I could be spending my time with anyone, you know,” which was bad enough on its own but made worse by the way she said it, like she wasn’t even trying to be cruel, like it went without saying that she doesn’t feel the same near-drowning desperation that has plagued Ronan since they met, when something she hadn’t known she was missing slotted neatly into place.

Aurora makes a soft shocked noise and hurries over with an effortless grace that Ronan, deep in the throes of puberty, envies even more than she did as a child. “Oh, honey. Are you all right?”

She’s old enough to be embarrassed about being caught crying, but something about her mother’s presence just makes everything seem all right, so she allows her back to be rubbed until she finally hiccups to a stop. Most children believe their parents can fix everything, curing scrapes and bruises with a kiss, and Ronan, despite herself, has never quite outgrown the conviction.

“I need to ask you something,” she says, and Aurora nods in the slightly distracted way she’s always had, like something just a bit more interesting is happening just above Ronan's head. Try as she might, Ronan has never been able to command her mother’s full attention, and the whole of her aches for it. “But you can’t tell anyone. Not even Dad. Please?”

“Of course, honey. What is it?” Aurora continues to rub circles into her back, and Ronan notices that there’s something mechanical about them, a vaguely inhuman precision.

“If I were— If there were something different about me, would you still love me?”

“Absolutely. Nothing could change the way I feel about you girls.” Aurora brushes a lock of hair out of Ronan’s face. “What is it? You should know you can tell me anything.”

“I think that I’m—I mean. I’ve been thinking about it and I’m pretty sure I like girls.” The circles stop abruptly, but Ronan takes a moment to realize, sputtering forward, “I think I’m—Mom?”

“Yes?” she asks, as if there’s nothing strange about the way she’s frozen, hand still on Ronan’s back.

“Is that—okay?”

“I don’t know,” she says, like Ronan has asked for next week’s weather report and she hasn’t had the chance to check it. Her fingertips trail lightly, finishing the circled she’d halted on, and she stands. “But I do know that I love you very much.” She smiles as if this has solved anything, and leans down to pull Ronan into her arms one last time, and leaves.

She promised not to tell anyone, but the next time Ronan sees her father, he holds her at a distance, still greets her first but says she’s too heavy to be picked up, and the time after that, his head is split open at her feet.

If he had lived, she likes to think she would have had a chance, that he just needed time. The uncertainty eats at her, along with the nightmare visions that haunt her every time she closes her eyes, and the knowledge that she might have saved him if she’d come along sooner. Her father died not loving her as much as he once did, and her world narrows to the things that can dull the ache of what she’s lost to something livable.

On the one month anniversary of her own personal apocalypse, she means to go out racing, but Gansey cracks open a beer and hands it her. Thrilled by what seems to be the return of her best friend, instead of the ineffectual chaperone who’s been plaguing her, she takes it, and then another, and another, and by the time she realizes what’s happening, she can barely walk, let alone drive. “Hey!” she says, squinting at Gansey, who’s smirking down at her model of Henrietta with an air that can only be described as self-satisfied.

Gansey uses a box cutter to slice the flaps off the Cocoa Puffs box that will serve as the town hall, and occupies herself neatening the ragged edges. “As maladaptive as this coping mechanism is, at least you’re staying where I can see you.”

Ordinarily, this would make Ronan determined to escape by any means necessary, up to and including climbing out the window and possibly breaking her neck. But she’s been called a dyke about a dozen times since she shaved her head, which would have been totally predictable if she’d thought about it at _all_ before doing it, and it grates at her more than she lets on. Each time, it’s like something’s cracked open fresh in her chest, like losing her father all over again.

She explains, because she’s drunk enough that the world’s gone soft around the edges and so has she. Gansey has stuck by her, improbably, through everything, has given her something as close to a home as she’s likely to have ever again. If Gansey can tolerate the empties spread everywhere, the snuck cigarettes with smoke wafted haphazardly out the window, the snippy comments regretted seconds too late, then, surely, she can take this. And if she can’t, well. At least then Ronan will know that she deserves what’s happened to her.

“Oh, _Ronan_ ,” Gansey says when she’s finished, sounding undone in a way she didn’t even when Ronan called from the police station where she was giving a statement. (“I’ll take my one phone call now,” she said, smeared with her father’s blood from trying, nonsensically, to administer CPR to a man who no longer quite had a chest, and no one laughed, and when she heard Gansey's voice on the other end, she found that she’d lost her own. Devin, calm despite rope burn on her wrists and ankles, had to pluck the phone from her grasp and explain. Ronan hated her for it. By the time Gansey arrived, Ronan was homeless, and then after a long debate she couldn’t follow, she wasn't, bundled off to a factory on the outskirts of town.)

Ronan waits for something more. Gansey has ended up next to her, somehow, during the telling of it, crammed onto the twin bed close enough to extinguish the fear that this would change things, a terror suffocated by the awkward embrace of someone who hasn’t been hugged much.

Gansey runs a hand along the barely-there fuzz of Ronan's hair and cups the back of her head, a thumb against one of the eight new piercings in Ronan’s right ear. She shouldn’t, because of the risk of infection, and Ronan congratulates herself on having the thought, some last flicker of self-preservation she’d thought had died out. “God, Ronan.”

Ronan pulls away, sitting up on her elbows at the far edge of the bed, and snaps, “That’s not very useful,” hoping Gansey won’t hear the slight hitch in her voice.

“I know. I’m sorry,” Gansey says, and the halting sincerity of it makes Ronan feel like she’s going to choke.

“Neither is that.”

 Gansey shrugs, a small, helpless gesture, and opens another beer. “For what it’s worth, and I know it’s not much, there’s really nothing wrong with being gay, and—” Ever the repressed WASP, Gansey pauses, screws up her face and continues after a long moment, “What I’m trying to say is that you’re my best friend, and you can tell me absolutely anything, and I love you.” Ronan spits up half of her beer and only _just_ doesn’t ruin a month’s worth of notes waiting to be typed up. Gansey pats her back as she coughs, which makes things worse not only because she’s hitting too hard, but because Ronan can feel the burn of her cheeks turning bright red, and doesn’t quite want to concede the ready-made excuse of being unable to breathe.

Once she’s recovered, she says without quite the acerbic tone she’s shooting for, “Anyone would think you’re the dyke around here.” Gansey grimaces but lets her have it, lets her pretend the tears in her eyes are from coughing up an entire bottle of beer and not the desperate relief of knowing she isn’t unforgivably, unlovably flawed.

 

**Author's Note:**

> > girl  
> looking like a wild thing  
> if you keep on your loving way  
> if you don't stop caring and fearing  
> and noticing things  
> and understanding things  
> people gone call you crazy  
> 
> 
> -Lucille Clifton


End file.
